BY AUSTRALIAN GEOGRAPHIC | SEPTEMBER 11, 2019
Pink, orange and yellow: Australia’s robins are one of the country’s most colourful birds.

THE FIRST THING you need to know about Australia’s robins is that they’re nothing like European robins. They actually belong to a family called Petroicidae or Australasian robins, which contains 49 species.

As Bec Crew writes, Australian robins were named after European robins by ornithologists who travelled to Australia at the time of European settlement and decided to call them robins too, despite fundamental genetic and morphological differences between them.

Australia’s robins have to be considered some of the country’s cutest birds. Round, puffy and brightly coloured, they’re much-loved and widely photographed. Here are some of our favourites.